Comment by cdev_gl

Sorry this comes a bit late, but the answer is you don't really need a performance machine for doing layout. Since Adobe's apps were originally built 30 years ago, the minimum requirements remain quite low. Moving images around a page can handle quite a bit of lag. You don't even need a rented machine with a quality GPU.

I pay for this workspace: $9.75/month-Hourly-Windows licensed-Performance-2vCPU,8GB Memory,80GB Root,50GB User

Since I'm only doing layout on an as-needed basis while hiking, rather than doing it full time, I tend to spend around $45 or less a month.